Australia has a unique connection to the infamous British train robber Ronnie Biggs, who has died aged 84.

On New Year's Day in 1966, Biggs, who had escaped Wandsworth Prison and undergone plastic surgery to conceal his identity, flew to Australia under the name Terence Furminger.

His wife Charmian and their sons followed him shortly after.

The family initially settled in Adelaide before moving to Melbourne after Biggs received an anonymous letter saying Interpol suspected he was in Australia.

Charmian spoke to the ABC's Australian Story about their time on the run in Australia, during which a third son was born.

"I didn't come til the June. I loved him very much and I didn't want the children to grow up without a father," she recalled.

"So the possibility that we were going to go somewhere else in the world together and start life afresh was what I wanted.

"And not very long into the piece I became pregnant. We came to live in Melbourne and Ron got work immediately working as a carpenter. I got a job working in a biscuit factory."

She said by that stage the money from the robbery had already been spent.

"We didn't have any of the proceeds of the robbery because the people who were minding it produced it when asked to help him to pay for his legal fees and to eventually help him escape, and the rest of it went on paying for him to have plastic surgery and come to Australia. And that just about accounted for all of it," she said.

"We had quite a good social life. We were friends with all the neighbours and they came to our place and we went to theirs. It was quite a pleasant, normal, suburban existence."

Interpol catches up in Australia

In 1969 a news report revealed Interpol was looking for Biggs in Melbourne. Biggs fled straight into hiding and Charmian set out to visit him, but was intercepted straight away.

"I got a few hundred yards down my street when all hell let loose and police cars came from everywhere and my car was pulled up and they dragged me out of it and they were waving guns and goodness knows what. And I was arrested," she said.

Her capture was an international media sensation, and Charmian sold her story to the Packer media organisation.

"[They] got me out of the watch-house in very short order and put all the necessary wheels in motion to get the children back immediately and we were reunited," she said.

"I was paid $65,000 for the story but the taxman took $40,000 of it. So I was left with enough money to buy this house, which was $19,000 at the time."

The Packer fee also funded Biggs' escape from Australia five months later. In that time Charmian Biggs had seen her husband only once, for an hour, the night before he embarked on a passenger liner using a falsified passport.

She said she thought when he departed she might never see him again, and shortly afterwards was forced to cope alone with the death of their eldest son in a car accident.

However in 1974 she was flown by the Australian media to Rio de Janeiro after Biggs' arrest.

"He was transferred to the foreigners' prison and a Sydney newspaper arranged for me to fly to see him," she told Australian Story.

"When I got there I was shocked to discover that he had a Brazilian girlfriend who was pregnant. I was in on a prison visit with him, when he's telling me, I want you to divorce me. And I was weeping, so upset.

"All of a sudden the doors of the room where we were, were flung open and in came about 20 or 30 press with cameras and the whole bit."

'We never stopped talking to each other'

Despite Biggs fathering a child in Brazil and remarrying, Charmian stayed in contact with him and is not bitter about their relationship.

"We never stopped talking to each other... In 1997 I went back to England to see my mother. I'd spoken to Ron on the phone and he suggested that I go home to Australia via Rio. And it was a very pleasant two-week holiday," she said.

"For once he was on his own and there was no press, no anything. And it felt like when we were first married together. I mean, I wouldn't say it was a grand passion reawakened or anything. It was just comfortable and it was friendly and it was nice and it was something that I hadn't had in a long time and I really enjoyed it."

After coming on board as a consultant for a miniseries about her life with him, Charmian took the chance to meet up with the ailing Biggs in England after his release from a British jail in 2009.

"He has a letter board with the alphabet on it and he points to letters to spell the words out," she recalled.

"He saw that I had tears in my eyes and he looked at me and he went [shakes her head] and then he pointed at himself and then his little board and spelt out the words "love" and then pointed at me," she said.

"People ask me how I'll feel when he dies. I mean he may well outlast me. But I'd be very sad because such a large part of my life has been involved with him and the aftermath of what he participated in."

Charmian Brent's two sons went on to have successful professional careers, but she says they have had little contact with their father since he left Australia.

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